Word: sovietization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That will risk alienating the Chinese people. Obama should take a lesson from the Cold War: American Presidents criticized Soviet leaders while demonstrating respect for average Soviets - and winning Soviet hearts and minds in the process. Obama could make clear that any China critiques apply only to the leadership; one way would be to simply replace mentions of China with references to the Communist Party in every State Department report. At the same time, he could boost U.S.-China person-to-person links by expanding student visas, opening more U.S. consulates in interior China and restoring State Department visitor...
...that I'll never go there." But now Europe is free from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, its peoples mingling happily, trading with each other, watching the same football games, sharing the same Aegean beaches. Hansa towns on the Baltic, once trapped in a frozen Soviet stubble, now bustle with energy; Poles revive Catholic churches in Ireland and Britain; Russians turn ski resorts in the French Alps into little St. Petersburgs...
This is astonishing. When one thinks back to how dangerously unstabilizing the collapse of the Soviet Union was thought to be in the early 1990s, it is little short of miraculous that the Continent should have been so peaceful, and so prosperous, for so long. Even the wars of the Yugoslav succession, long and brutal though they may have been, were contained. In the mid-1990s, there were fears that other parts of Central and Eastern Europe would see the same sort of ethnic cleansing as the former Yugloslavia. It never happened...
...geography should flow two pressing priorities of European strategic policy: closer engagement with Russia and with Turkey. Both nations feel aggrieved at their treatment by Europe, Russia because (in breach of promises made in the early 1990s) NATO was extended not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union but actually inside them; Turkey because it thinks that the E.U. intends to dangle the carrot of accession, while never truly intending Turkey to nibble...
...much for the courtship. The intimidation of Europe's East - the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic - is also doing fine. Ukraine and the Baltics, after all, were once part of the Soviet Union, and the others were satrapies until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Never mind that all of them, with the exception of Ukraine, are now firmly embedded in E.U. and NATO; for Russia they are either the "near abroad" or what the tsars used to call Russia's "sphere of influence...